Books

Berlingeles

“BERLINGELES reads like an episode of Black Mirror, as conceived by Kafka. Echoes of the past collide with a nightmarish future, set forth in elegant, compulsive prose.”
—Meg Howrey, author of The Wanderers

In a dystopian future, Los Angeles has been walled-in, Berlin-style, and Gaz, a rising member of the city’s most notorious street gang finds himself pitted against our 96-year-old protagonist, K. Seeking a way out of this hellish maze of sweeping slums, waves of violence, and little hope, Gaz might just have found his path to salvation, while the underworld hangs on the prophecies of blind prophet Gerut, and the rest of the lost city still smolders in the ashes of a civil war.

Berlingeles brings the future into sharp Gibsonian focus, constructs Dickian landscapes, and brings forth a haunting vision of what lies just beyond our world gone awry. Stefan Kiesbye has been hailed as the inventor of the modern German gothic novel, and with his new novel, he gives us cyberpunk as only he can.

Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames

“Some towns change with the times while others seem to fall through the cracks, entering an oddly timeless domain. The latter is the case with Strathleven, in which the rituals and darkness of the past seem always to be glimmering just below the surface of a seemingly normal shell. Wonderfully controlled and with a very deft, beautifully done tone, Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames is the sort of thing that might happen if The Wicker Man had been cross-pollinated with one of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s detective novels.”—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

“No contemporary writer’s work scares me more than Kiesbye’s. Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames is gothic and whatever the opposite of pastoral is rendered in his signature spare, whittled-to-the-bone style.”—Jeff Parker, author of Where Bears Roam the Streets

“Kiesbye is the inventor of the modern German gothic novel.”—Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt

“In Strathleven, a village near Lübeck, mysterious events occur. The newly arrived Benno and his family are faced with the corpse of an unknown woman, superstition, vicious sermons, and isolation. A modern gothic novel: quirky, very readable, and interesting from the first page to the last.”—Peter Peterknecht, Deutschlandradio Kultur

“Ancient pagan Germanic myths and customs pervade the history of Strathleven and its inhabitants. Nothing seems to follow the simple course of events, but old and savage rules; the only apparent escape is to commit new acts of violence.”—Magdalene Geisler, der Freitag

Moving from Berlin to Strathleven, a picture-perfect village on the Baltic Coast, was supposed to be a new beginning for Benno, his wife Carolin, and their six-year-old son, Tim, who is suffering from a mysterious illness. However, shortly after arriving in the country, Benno finds the corpse of a young woman in the woods, and when no one in the village admits to having known her, Benno initiates his own investigation. He digs deep into Strathleven’s superstitions and ritualistic past to recover the history of the murdered woman, yet will he be able to save his marriage and the lives of his wife and son?

The Staked Plains

Saddle Road Press will publish the novella “The Staked Plains.” Advance review copies will be available in October, with a December publication date.

Lee K. Abbott says, “. . . it will scare the stuffings out of you, for its world is in steep moral decline. Think McCarthy meets O’Connor meets Tarantino.”

Next Door Lived a Girl (now available as a Kindle e-book)

Set in Wedersen, a working-class town in post-World War II Germany, Next Door Lived a Girl explores the dark transformation of young boys into young men. The town’s veneer of peaceful industry barely conceals the ugly secrets that lie beneath. Moritz and his friends make a dangerous discovery that pulls them into a war with a rival gang, into the ruthless and cunning world of blackmail and consequence, and, ultimately, into a cascading series of events that will change the nature of their friendship, and their lives, forever.

“This is Stefan Kiesbye’s brilliant debut, a book so quiet and yet so maddeningly powerful, you just have to wonder about him a little bit… In clear and lucid prose, Next Door Lived A Girl reads as the truest of true-crime novels. Its protagonist is the remembering everyboy who suffers profoundly and in turn commits the gravest of acts. His is a telling voice, agile, insightful and darkly humorous. He does not ask for understanding because he knows you could not possibly understand what happens and he does not ask for forgiveness because he knows you could never forgive such terrible actions.”— Robert Olmstead